Arts & Culture | Theater

Whether you hail Edward Snowdon as a hero or condemn him as a traitor, the Snowdon case has brought renewed attention to the role of spies in international politics. Now comes Leonard Lehrman and Joel Shatzky’s left-wing cabaret show, “Superspy!: The S-e-c-r-e-t Musical,” a spoof of Cold War espionage thrillers. Lehrman, the composer, will be at the piano as he and his wife, Helene Williams, play all the characters in the show. Featuring songs like “The SDI Waltz,” a reference to the Strategic Defense Initiative, the show runs for three performances over the next two weeks, beginning this Friday, at the Medicine Show Theatre in Midtown.

Terrorists come in all shapes and sizes — and all levels of wealth and education. In Dick Brukenfeld’s new play, “Blind Angels,” a Jewish journalist is taken captive in New York by a group of his former Yale classmates, who are planning a 9/11-style attack. As many liberals have done, the play questions our nation’s use of force, suggesting that American drone attacks have led to reprisals by terrorists. It premieres next week at the Theater for the New City in the East Village.

Nowadays, people constantly snap photos of themselves — known as “selfies” — and post them casually on the Internet. But in earlier periods of history, portraits were carefully constructed, enduring expressions of a sitter’s self-image and sense of importance in society. In Sarah Levine Simon’s comedy, “The Portrait,” the 18th-century rendering of a Jewish ancestor leads to squabbling among his descendants over the ownership of the valuable painting. The play runs through this weekend at Theatre 54 in Midtown.

There may be only a handful left today, but less than a century ago, there were tens of thousands of Jewish Communists in New York who decried the gap between rich and poor in the city. Now comes Billy Yalowitz’s “East Towards Home,” a 90-minute play that uses dance, live music and animation to connect the Yiddish-speaking, left-wing Jews of New York to the music of Woody Guthrie, whose folk tunes gave voice to the parched people of the Dust Bowl during the Depression.

If ever pop music could be said to define a generation, it was in the 1960s, a time of social ferment set to the beat and rhythm of youth. Carole King, working with her husband Gerry Goffin, helped to set the tone for that era with her catchy tunes about the elusiveness and slipperiness of love. In “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical,” which opened last Sunday at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre, King’s music shines through the decades. But the musical itself, which stars Jessie Mueller in a scintillating performance as the composer, never quite coheres into a satisfying show.

She took an unconventional route to superstardom, but it was a soulful road that Carole King traveled.

Born Carol Klein in Brooklyn in 1942, she did not set out to become a performer. In “Beautiful,” the new musical about King that opens this Sunday on Broadway, King’s career as a budding songwriter comes to the fore. Starring Jessie Mueller (“On a Clear Day You Can See Forever”) as King, the musical opens a window on a pivotal 1960s era in pop music in which a group of mostly Jewish composers and lyricists wrote for mostly black performers, changing the face of American culture in the process.